“Our kids are stumbling,” I write to Steve. “A friend in recovery once compared recovery to learning how to walk again—we expect a toddler to take a few steps and fall, get up again and fall, and so it goes until walking becomes easier. But still they fall at times. That doesn’t mean relapse is inevitable, but it happens, and it is not failure.”
“Thank you all for writing back and for what you each said,” Steve writes in a long email. At the very end, he adds the most beautiful words. They take my breath away:
In the shades of sorrow and hope there is a contour, a shape you all gave me to what love is; a shape I could feel.
I think about that sentence for a long time, wondering if hope and sorrow are shadows of the real thing, the thing with shape and contours, the thing that is friendship, connection, love. Some realities are beyond us—beyond our understanding, beyond explanation, beyond our control—but there is also something solid and substantial between us. We cannot control the beyond, but we have some power over the between. It is up to us to create and maintain the between that is friendship and love, and we need to work at it. To keep the connections strong and secure, we do not let go. Of this, we do not let go.
We do not let go of forgiveness or compassion. We do not let go of honesty or humility (“I can do some things, but I cannot do everything”). We do not let go of the past or our belief in a future, but we can learn how to live in the present with awareness of what we cannot control, accepting our mistakes as part of being human. For as that grand old philosopher William James put it, “Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a world where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of heart seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf.”
When Ben opens his acceptance letter from Whitman, we whoop and holler, laugh and cry. He’ll be safe here, I think. He won’t get lost. We’ll have Sunday dinners together. Dag will keep an eye on him. His professors will make sure he’s showing up and doing the work. He’s come home.
And so, for the second time, first at the University of Washington and now at Whitman College, Ben begins his freshman year. We move him into the freshman dorm with high hopes. Hopes get ramped up a bit higher when he decides not to pledge a fraternity.
“I think he’s going to be okay,” Pat says one night. Once again, we dare to dream he’s on the right path.
Two weeks into the semester, Ben stops by Pat’s office to complain about a teacher who gave him a D on a paper.
“Do you know how fucking hard I worked on that paper?” Ben says, red-faced and furious.
“Maybe next time you’ll have to work harder,” Pat says calmly.
“I hate this fucking place,” Ben says on his way out the door.
A college security guard tells us that Ben was drunk and belligerent at a weekend concert. We thank him for telling us, but we don’t say anything to Ben. It’s his business.
He doesn’t show up for Sunday dinner, and we don’t call him.
We are not so wise as we are weary. Every Tuesday night, I faithfully attend the parent support group I started and patterned after my much-loved Wilderness group. There are just four of us the first night—Lenna, Marla, Gail, and me—but every week, someone new joins the group. We meet in a cavernous church room and sit on tattered couches that I insist on pushing together into a sort-of circle. The group laughs with me when I start pushing the heavy couches together—they know I’m obsessed with circles.
We tell our stories, and they are among the saddest stories in the world—tales of children who are sick unto death and families torn apart by guilt, grief, confusion, and pain. And yet, in and through the tears, there is healing. Just being with people who have walked the same tortuous pathway, who have stumbled, regained their balance, stumbled again and again, and kept on going gives us strength and courage. In those circles, we do not feel judged and condemned. We do not feel so alone.
Our stories are all different, and yet they are somehow all the same. We see ourselves in the mirror of another person’s story. That reflection does not come without the deepest sort of pain, for we connect with each other at the broken places. “There is a crack in everything,” as songwriter Leonard Cohen wrote. “That’s how the light gets in.” The light mixes with the darkness, and we laugh as much as we cry.
One evening, two new mothers come to group. They do not know each other, but they happen to sit next to each other on the same sofa. The first woman tells her story. “My twenty-four-year-old son loves his family. His sister adores him. He was always such a great kid, got straight A’s, had big dreams for his life until he started using drugs—marijuana, cocaine, then heroin.” She is ripping a wad of tissues to shreds in her lap. “And now—now I don’t even know who he is.”
The woman next to her leans forward, her eyes wide with wonder. “That’s my story,” she says, stumbling over her words. “I can’t believe it. You just told my story!” The two women hug, holding on to each other as if they have known each other their whole lives.
An everyday experience in a vast, unheated room full of shabby old couches, where strangers gather around to tell their stories—and in the telling and the listening, something unexpected and extraordinary occurs.
A miracle of sorts. And for every miracle, there is a story.
Time before time, when the world was young, a brother and a sister shared a field and a mill. Each night, they divided evenly the grain they had ground together during the day. Now, as it happened, the sister lived alone, while her brother had a wife and a large family. One day, the sister thought to herself: “It isn’t fair that we divide the grain evenly. I have only myself to care for, but my brother has children to feed.” So each night, she secretly took some of her grain to her brother’s granary to see that he was never without.
One day, the brother said to himself, “It isn’t really fair that we divide the grain evenly, because I have children to provide for me in my old age, but my sister has no one. What will she do when she is old?” So every night, he secretly took some of his grain to his sister’s granary. As a result, both of them always found their supply of grain mysteriously replenished each morning.
One night, they met each other halfway between their two houses. When they realized what had been happening, they embraced each other in love. The story is that God witnessed their meeting and proclaimed, “This is a holy place—a place of love—and here it is that my temple shall be built.”
And so it was. The holy place, where God is made known, is the place where human beings discover each other in love.
14
order from chaos
March 2007
We’re at the beach in a rental house, just Pat and I and Sophie and Murphy, our two springer spaniels. One night after dinner, we walk to the cliff at the end of the beach. The sun is setting, and the sky is pink and purple, with just a touch of blue. The ocean is silver, the white-capped waves relentless. Sophie and Murphy bound ahead of us, chasing the snowy plovers into the frigid water. We whistle them back, afraid they will follow the birds’ flight path and get carried off into the deep, darkening sea.
I wonder for a moment: What would I do if a wave took one of them? Would I go after her? Instantly, I know I would, even dressed in my winter coat and fleece pants. I’m a strong swimmer, but I imagine her sinking under the waves and me waiting for her to surface, the ice cold water moving into and through me, draining my energy, threatening to pull me down. Would I be able to save myself and return to shore?
With a grateful heart, I watch them running back toward us, big ears flopping and what looks like a grin on their faces as the wind pushes against them. We laugh as we put their leashes on and start back toward the house. We’re almost to the pathway leading up through the rocks when Pat stops suddenly.
“Look at that,” he says in a hushed voice. Resting on the beach is a branch, big as a small tree, washed up close to the dunes.
“It’s a
perfect circle,” he says, raising his voice above the crash of the waves. I look and see what I had not seen before. Traced around the branch is a circle. A nearly perfect circle.
“I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Pat says, pointing to the center of the circle, where the heaviest part of the tree branch rests. “There’s the pivot point. See, the branch is shaped so it has a bend at the heavy end—that’s the pivot point. And here,” he points to the tapered end of the branch where it touches the sand, “it’s lighter than the pivot point. When the tide came up, the water must have been just deep enough to float the lighter end, and the heavier center stayed grounded. The waves somehow managed to move the tree branch around in a circle until the tide went out again.”
He’s quiet for a moment, looking at the circle in something approaching wonder. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime thing. It must have happened right when the tide was dropping. The branch had to have been pushed around in a circle precisely when the tide dropped enough to ground both ends because otherwise the waves would have washed the sand smooth again.”
I can’t take my eyes off the circle carved in the sand by a large piece of wood that happened to be washed ashore at precisely the right time. If Pat hadn’t been with me, I would have never seen that circle. I might have stepped around it or straight into it, ruining its near perfection. Most likely I would have considered it an obstacle in my way.
“Chaos produces order,” Pat says as he stares out at the sea and then back at the circle.
“What do you mean?” I want—I need—to understand how disorder and disarray can lead to stability and harmony.
“The tide must have been really high to reach this point, so close to the dunes. Imagine it—the waves are coming in all over the place; they’re bouncing off the rocks. And this huge piece of driftwood is turning, swiveling, standing its ground but tossed about by the waves. It’s chaotic. But out of that chaos, this circle was created.”
The dogs are tired and lay down in the sand, curling up next to each other to stay warm.
“Chaos often produces very regular stuff,” Pat says. He is usually so quiet, a man of few words, except when he’s talking to his students. Then he’s animated, full of energy and enthusiasm about the earth and its history. I don’t have a long attention span when it comes to science, but I tend to ask lots of questions. In his kindness, knowing the way my mind works, he’s careful to keep his explanations short and to the point. But order emerging out of chaos, stability and harmony arising from turbulence and confusion? I’m entranced.
“Tell me how that happens,” I say in a near whisper.
“Well, think about the wind blowing across a sandy beach. It produces a whole field of symmetrical ripples. But the way the wind produces a ripple is by chaotic turbulence in its flow. If you look at the air flow in the winds generating a ripple, it’s all over the place, spinning, and interfering, but the result is a nearly perfect train of ripples across the surface.”
I imagine the wind moving across a lake. I picture the breeze moving through the wheat fields near our home. I see the wind gust on the ocean as it pushes and pulls at the surface to create waves. I think about what Ernie said about the wind as a metaphor for spirituality. We know the wind is there by its effect on things—leaves in the trees, blowing sand, ocean waves. We experience it, feel it, encounter it, but we can’t see it except in its influence on the world around us. Like so much that takes place in our world, we cannot control or command it.
“It’s such a delicate balance,” Pat is saying, “between the tides and the waves and the weight of the log—just enough buoyancy to float one end of the tree branch and push it around in circles, but not enough wave activity to pull it back into the sea and wash away the evidence that it ever existed. You could scour beaches for the rest of your life and never find something like this again.”
“So what does all this mean? What does it mean in human terms?” I’m shivering with the cold. The dogs look at us with impatient perplexity as if to say, What are you talking about? What’s so important that we can’t go home and lie down in our warm beds?
Pat stares at the circle. “I think it means we are just where we’re supposed to be. If one thing had been changed in our lives, everything else would have gone an entirely different direction. I wouldn’t have met you in the tavern playing pool that Friday night. We wouldn’t have our children. We would be living an entirely altered existence. Or we might not be alive at all.”
We’re both thinking the same thing. “Like Ben,” Pat says after a moment. “It would be impossible to determine what event was the turning point in his life. Was it the bullying? Losing his best friend at such a pivotal age? Genetics? I don’t think we can point to one cause with any certainty. I believe it’s just the way things happened. His set of chances ended up with him where he is, at this point in time, and my set of chances ended up with me where I am. It’s the way things are.”
“So, there’s no changing it or wishing it were different,” I say, knowing the answer.
“If you change one thing, you change the whole thing.”
“Is it all chance, then?”
“That’s what I believe. It’s all chance.”
As chaotic as that seems, I am consoled. Chance. Chance events can create order out of chaos. That seems to me a sort of miracle.
We walk over the dunes toward the house. I look back at the circle one more time. It is almost but not quite perfect. When the tide returns, it will be gone. It exists only for this small period of time, and then it will vanish.
We have only this moment.
“What about God?” I ask Pat, after we get back to the house, give the dogs a bath, take showers, and snuggle up in blankets on the sofa.
“Well, the chance thing is one of the major arguments creationists have against evolution. The chances of evolving something as sophisticated and complex as, say, a human eye are vanishingly small.”
“Ooh,” I say. “I like that phrase—vanishingly small.”
“Vanishingly small,” he repeats with a smile. “How can such a random series of events result in something so perfect as a human eye? It can’t, creationists say. Nobody has ever seen a partially evolved eye. Animals don’t have half-eyes. So, rather than random chance, it has to be an all-knowing, all-powerful God who created the human eye and who orchestrated all these seemingly random events.
“And that’s a valid point of view if you don’t believe in the role chance plays in earth history or in the history of an individual’s life. Nobody wants their individual existence to be governed by random chance. That’s unacceptable to most people. So, we create something or find evidence to support something to make sense of it all. You’ve heard me say that if it’s my day to die, it doesn’t matter what I’m doing, I’ll die somehow.”
“But that sounds predetermined. That doesn’t sound like chance.”
“The thing of it is, I have nothing to do with it. My chances are unique to me. I don’t know what they are or how they will play out in the end. If it’s my day, I’m toast.”
“You don’t really believe that.”
“I do.”
“But that sounds like you believe in God.”
“It does, and it’s probably why a lot of scientists end up believing in the existence of God. Ultimately, we can’t explain any of this with science. I can talk all I want about what happened a billion years ago on earth, but I can’t convince you unless you are willing to be convinced that what I’m saying is true.”
“So, is there a place for God in your science?”
“Well, it would be the AA thing.” He reaches down to stroke the dogs, who are lying on the floor at our feet. “I view the Higher Power idea in two ways. First, alcohol is more powerful than I am, so I don’t challenge or test myself against it anymore. And second, my life is governed by powers greater than my own will or understanding. I make the day-to-day decisions, but the course of my life is determined by events and i
nfluences that are not in my control. Things are going to happen regardless of what I do or don’t do.
“I can’t and won’t deny the existence of anyone else’s conception of God as a being that plans or oversees our lives, but I’d rather think about the millions of possibilities that exist at each and every turn. Earth is a really old planet, and geological time is deep. There’s plenty of time for random chances to become certainties.”
Pat is quiet for a few moments. “Scientists are never engaged in trying to find the truth,” he says finally. “If they say they are, they are lying to you. What scientists are trying to do is find a reason that something can’t be true. Does the truth even exist? It’s true that the sun comes up every morning. But do you see the same sunrise I see? I can hold a rock in my hand and say, ‘This is a rock.’ But do you observe the same shape and substance of the rock I hold in my hand? Truth is subject to an individual’s reality.”
For some reason, I think about the time Robyn’s first-grade teacher showed the class a picture of a snake, a frog, and a lizard and asked, “Which one is different?” Most of the children chose the snake because, unlike the frog and the lizard, it doesn’t have any legs. But Robyn, daughter of a scientist, chose the frog. The teacher was flummoxed—why would she choose the frog when the answer was so clearly the snake?
“Because the frog is an amphibian, and the snake and the lizard are reptiles,” she explained.
Robyn was right. And the children who chose the snake were also right. There’s more than one truth, more than one perspective, more than one way “to be.” The “truth”—the one and only right answer—changes, morphs, moves in a never-ending circle, exactly as the tree branch on the beach circled round and round itself, moved by the wind and the tides—an unlikely circle of life forces emanating from the sea, the source. Perhaps this image is an answer to my prayers, an acceptance of the unlikely coexistence of two entities that do not belong together, each acting and reacting to make a whole cloth out of disparate threads.
The Only Life I Could Save Page 21
